SEEBURGER Business Intelligence server (BIS) is one of the most common EDI translators in most SAP Implementation projects. SAP PI is also typically available in such a landscape being extensively to support various Integration needs.
SEEBURGER BIS has distinct features to support B2B communication/Integration. A few of them are as follows
- Managed File Transfer
- Out of the Box/Standardized EDI translation mechanisms
- Support for secured protocols like AS2, SFTP required for critical and sensitive financial/Customer transactions.
- Support for High Volume transactions and large message sizes.
- Out of the box features for Partner/Agreement management.
With that said, BIS has certain limitations in its native integration with SAP systems. The integration mechanisms available are IDOC and File systems. SAP PI can bridge the gap to produce an efficient implementation.
The following are a few use cases for SAP PI and SEEBURGER BIS to be used together in a landscape
Native communication with SAP systems
In majority of SAP implementations, a common integration strategy used is to avoid creation of custom IDOC types. More so in cases where the number of source fields on the interface is not large and custom logic needs to be implemented to populate such fields. ABAP Proxy using the XI adapter is an obvious choice in most cases.
SEEBURGER BIS does not support a proxy like communication. In order to achieve the same a pass-through or a hop interface can be built with SAP PI passing the message to SEEBURGER BIS, without any data transformation. BIS can then transform this message into an acceptable target format and transmit it to the business partner via a secure channel.
BIS supports inbound and outbound HTTP calls. SAP PI can connect to SEEBURGER BIS via a receiver HTTP adapter.
This would reduce the development effort of an SAP system by avoiding creation of custom IDOC types. This should only be done for interfaces in which the message sizes are not too large and the additional delay in message processing due to the hop interface is acceptable. This would avoid failures in PI due to message sizes.
Transmission of data to business partners using secured protocols like AS2 or SFTP
This is a case in which, message sizes are small and the transformations are easily achievable within SAP PI or is delivered as predefined content within SAP PI e.g. SAP ECC and Experian Integration for Credit Checks. Here the requirement is to deliver files (non-EDI) to business partners using secured mechanisms like SFTP or with encryptions not supported out of the box in SAP PI.
BIS supports an out of the box FTP server. This server has 2 nodes a Central or Internal Node and an external node on the DMZ. SAP PI can generate a file onto the central BIS node. BIS can then deliver the file via secured mechanisms like SFTP to business partners.
This is a pass-through process in BIS.
These are a few patterns which I implemented in one of my implementation and was able to achieve reduced development times and additional security benefits.. The PI version used was SAP PI 7.11 and the SEEBURGER version used was SEEBURGER BIS 6.3.3
